After 4 decades, Provincetown Medical Group closes its doors

Monday

Jun 19, 2017 at 7:00 AM

Katy Ward

PROVINCETOWN — Sitting in the lush garden outside their East End home on Commercial Street, Brian O’Malley and Wilsa Ryder talk about the bittersweet decision to close the doors of Provincetown Medical Group — which the couple has run since the early 1980s.

“The mom-and-pop shop that we were just doesn’t work anymore,” O’Malley, who officially retires today, says. “I never had the idea that I would retire at a certain age, but I just knew it was time.”

A retirement party will be held for the couple from 4 to 7 p.m. on Tuesday, June 20, at the Provincetown Theater at 238 Bradford Street. All are invited to attend. Last week the board of selectmen declared June 20 “Brian O’Malley and Wilsa Ryder Day.”

When O’Malley and Ryder came to town as fourth-year medical students in the early ’70s, the two had no intention of opening a practice here, nor did they know Provincetown would become the place they would raise their future children, Robin and Grace.

The two met while attending SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. and in September 1972 decided to come to Provincetown to complete their one-month specialized rotations. O’Malley focused on internal and community medicine and Ryder on pediatrics.

“I had the great luck or foresight to pick Provincetown,” O’Malley says. “I discovered Beech Forest and Herring Cove and I was, like, holy cow, I’m this Brooklyn guy. Neither of us were affiliated with this type of water.”

They fell in love with the close-knit community and, in 1977, the couple moved to town and started working at a doctor’s office on Center Street.

“This was before the rescue squad existed to deal with daily problems we have now,” O’Malley says. “Instead it was the local providers and physician’s assistants that would be on call for the town. If someone fell down rollerblading and called the cops, we were on call.”

After one summer they realized they needed to start their own practice.

“[The Center Street office] was driven by management rather than medical care from doctors,” O’Malley says. “We were believers in the community concept and it wasn’t a comfortable fit. So we started up our own.”

In 1978 they started preparing to open a medical office. “There’s a lot of things you need for a doctor’s office,” O’Malley says. “We started ordering file folders, doctor’s note paper, charts, records, filing systems, EKGs and all the surgical tools. Everything. The big order was the exam tables.”

But one week before their equipment arrived the building purchase they thought they had secured fell through.

“So we had it delivered to the house,” O’Malley says, laughing. “And we set up shop and worked here until we found the place on Shank Painter. Our living room was the waiting room and we used the dining room as the pediatric room. We had a lab in one of our back rooms. We had an extra exam table but nowhere to put it, so it was sitting in the waiting room and people were confused, thinking, ‘Is this where we need to get naked?’ A big chunk of our house was our office.”

“People would wander upstairs into our bedroom,” Ryder says. “People would come and there would be soup cooking in the kitchen and they would be, like, ‘Wow, it smells so homey in here.’ Well it is our home.”

Eventually they rented 30 Shank Painter Road from the late Ronnie White and his wife, Kathleen. In 1985 they purchased the building and renovated it.

For 40 years the couple served multiple generations of families in the area as one of the only health care centers in town. Together they made house calls and provided their services in exchange for art or fish. There were tough years in town, beginning in the spring of 1981.

“I diagnosed the first case [of AIDS in Provincetown],” O’Malley says. “I had been following a young man with blood abnormalities, funny blood counts that I couldn’t make sense of. I didn’t know what to make of it. I sent him to Lahey Clinic [in Boston] but we didn’t have the specialists back then that we have today. I sent him to hematology people there to find out what the heck was going on and they didn’t know. Then in June of 1981, the New England Journal published an article about a young man with a strange cluster of symptoms, very similar to the young man I was working with.”

The young man died shortly afterward and O’Malley went on to treat dozens of similar cases.

“For me it’s always about diagnosing stuff. Once you have the diagnosis the treatment tends to suggest itself,” O’Malley says. “Hardly any of the medications we work with today were around back in the day, but it always boils down to figuring out what’s going on. That’s the fun part. That’s the part I’m really going to miss. Helping people figure out what’s really going on and what’s likely the cause and what we can do about.”

Besides the electronic age, which made filing paperwork and keeping records impersonal and time-consuming, there were fewer kids in the school system and fewer full-time families, which forced Ryder into retirement in December 2014.

“It’s hard. Your definition of self changes,” Ryder says about her retirement. “It was an expensive proposition to stay in the game. We were basically paying to work.”

After she retired, O’Malley said things just weren’t the same.

“It was our thing: me and Wilsa,” he says. “Wilsa was the brains behind the real estate stuff, figured out financing and how to make it work and run the business. It got tougher when she wasn’t part of the office functioning. It took a lot of the soul out.”

Though O’Malley says he is sad to close the doors, he is also ready to enjoy retirement. He has a ticket to Galway, in the west of Ireland, to visit the O’Malley Clan Rally — which he says is a family event with banquets, O’Malley lore, history, eating, drinking and just “being merry.”

“I haven’t been there in 20 years and I’ve been wanting to do the rally for years,” O’Malley says.

Eventually O’Malley wants to teach at Cape Cod Community College, because it’s all about community.

“In a way, what brought us here was the need to be part of a community,” O’Malley says. “I feel like that has been incredibly amply accomplished. I feel like we came here and we became a part of an amazing community.”